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We call social media the new public square. How is this new visually saturated media landscape affecting the struggles for social justice? What role is photography playing in it and on it, and thus in and on those struggles? We live (virtually) in social media “bubbles,” research tells us. What we see there tends to reinforce what we already believe, it seems, and what we already believe shapes what we see. And yet the #BlackLivesMatter movement (among others) demonstrates this new media landscape’s power to draw at least some of us together across lines that tend to divide us. Drawing on Seeing and Believing, Ellen Armour will analyze these challenges and opportunities, offering strategies drawn from religious ways of seeing for navigating them to advance social justice.

Biography

Ellen T. Armour is professor and E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair of Feminist Theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School where she directs the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality. In addition to Seeing and Believing: Religion, Digital Visual Culture, and Social Justice (Columbia University Press, 2023), she is the author of Signs and Wonders: Theology after Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2016) and Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide (University of Chicago Press, 1999). She also co-edited Bodily Citations: Judith Butler and Religion (Columbia University Press, 2006).

Assigned Reading

Ellen Armour, Seeing and Believing: Religion, Digital Visual Culture, and Social Justice (Columbia University Press, 2023)